This Was 2017 in ‘Pirate’ Searches

Popular torrent sites get millions of visitors every day, but what are all those people searching for? Today we present the “torrent zeitgeist” of 2017, a list of the top 50 most searched-for phrases and keywords on one of the most-used public BitTorrent indexes during the past year.

Lists, list, lists, it’s that time of the year again. In December many prominent search engines publish their overviews of most used search terms.

On Google, Hurricane Irma was the most searched for term of the year, globally. With “It” and “Stranger Things” ending up as the most sought after movie and TV show respectively.

But what’s happening on torrent search engines? With billions of searches every year, it’s worth taking a look at the most-entered keywords on the dominant file-sharing network.

With data from one of the most visited torrent indexes, we compiled a list of 50 popular terms, to give an indication.

2017’s number one query is “Game of Thrones,” which was entered in several variations, often paired with the episode number. While it’s no surprise, considering the show’s popularity, as a TV-show it’s somewhat of an outlier.

The top 50 is mostly made up of movie titles. “Spider Man: Homecoming” ended up in the second spot, followed by “Baby Driver” and “War for the Planet of the Apes.”

The only non-title entry in the top ten is “Telugu 2017,” which shows how popular BitTorrent is in India. On most torrent sites nowadays, a large chunk of all visitors come from the Asian country.

Torrent sites are predominantly used to download video, which is evident from the list. There are no references to music at all, and “CracksNow” appears to be the only software related search.

Below is the full list of the Top 50 most-entered search queries based on a data sample provided by one of the most popular torrent sites on the Internet. Searches pointing to the same title have been combined.

Note that searches are not the same as download activity. The former are, in theory, easier to manipulate by outsiders.